“Laura, you wrote the following in a poem called ‘Telling’:

‘Those with power can afford
to tell their story
or not.
Those without power
risk everything to tell their story
and must.
Someone, somewhere
will hear your story and decide to fight,
to live and refuse compromise.
Someone else will tell
her own story,
risking everything.’

“Laura, I still don’t believe that you’re dead, that you won’t write another poem; take another grand adventure; post another lovely and important essay to your blog; rabble rouse, advocate, and publish that first necessary book of poems; go on loving as a disabled dyke mother poet activist. Laura, I just don’t believe it.

“When the news of your sudden passing came down through the community, I heard a lot of stories about how and when folks first met you, read your work. But me, I don’t know. I try to trace it back, when first you entered my world. Were you there in 1985 when I caught my first glimmer of disability politics in the anthology The Power of Each Breath? Or when I lived with a disabled dyke, sat on the front stoop with her, never even whispering the word disability? Or in 1993 when I wrote my first torrent of disability poems after hearing the gay disabled Jewish poet Kenny Fries read? All I know is somewhere in that decade as I came into my queer crip self, you entered my world, long before we ever met. But I don’t know when. Tracing the years back, I struggle to find that moment.  But every time I end with the sense, feeling, truth that, even though you were only months older than me, you came before me, made my life as a white queer crip poet rabble-rouser more possible. Your telling has always cradled, nurtured, fed mine.

“And so I want to send to you, wherever you are now, a fragment of writing queer poet to queer poet. One day as Laura and I and many others were organizing the Queer Disability Conference in 2002 we were emailing back and forth about designing  the conference t-shirt. Laura wrote, ‘Let’s use a quote.’ And then wrote, ‘I vote for a quote of Eli’s from ‘Gawking, Gaping, Staring’.’ I wrote back with a resounding, ‘No friggin way. We’re not putting the words of one of the core organizers on the conference t-shirt.’ And we moved on. But now I want to send these words out to you, Laura:

‘I am looking for friends and allies, communities where gawking, gaping, staring finally turns to something else, something true to the bone. Places where strength is softened and tempered, love honed and stretched. Where gender is more than a simple binary. Places where we encourage each other to swish and swagger, limp and roll, and learn the language of pride. Places where our bodies become home.’

‘Laura, thank you.”

“Disability Pride calls for celebration, hope, rebellion. We take shame, fear, and isolation, turn them around, and forge wholeness. Pride refuses to let the daily grind of ableism, discrimination, exclusion, violence, and patronizing define who we are. Pride knows our history, joyfully insists upon our present, and stretches into our future. It must not leave anyone behind—not folks in prison, not folks in nursing homes, group homes, their families’ back rooms, not folks in psych facilities, not our elders nor our youth. Pride demands and nurtures open, expansive community. Pride means listening hard and being accountable to each other. It means struggling against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and classism, just as stubbornly as we fight ableism. Pride isn’t about any single identity or community but rather about all of who we are—disabled people of color, disabled lesbians, gay men, and bisexual people, disabled women, disabled poor and working-class people, disabled immigrants, disabled transgender and transsexual people, psych survivors, people with intellectual disabilities, people with chronic illness, people with nonapparent disabilities. Pride asks uncomfortable questions and demands honest answers. It dances, sings, protests, loves, cries, fights, rolls, limps, laughs, stutters. Pride invites us to make home in our bodies and with each other.

“Pride fuels rebellion. During a time when U.S. troops are waging war in Afghanistan, millions of gallons of oil have been pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, and Arizona’s anti-immigration policies have just become law; strong, vibrant, rebellious communities are more necessary than ever. I hope we, as disabled people, will continue to take to the streets, knowing that war, environmental devastation, corporate greed, and criminalizing people of color have everything to do with disability. We need revolutionary pride, liberatory pride now!”

The photo is of Eli speaks at Disability Pride rally, wearing a black top hat with rhinestones and a rainbow boa.

I and a host of other folks decorated my trike for the parade. Here’s another pic:

The photo is of the back of Eli’s trike, above which is a banner that reads “Lame is sexy.” The trike is decorated with a big orange flower that is a whirlygig and spins in the breeze and a small disco ball hanging over the banner, among other things. Beside the trike stands Riva Lehrer, co-creator of this crip pride mobile, with her hand on her hip looking sexily into the camera. During the parade, a number of folks handed out Emi Koyama’s wonderful “Lame Is Sexy” button.

It started when I read “And Yet” to the class. Several stanzas read:

North on Baldwin Road, I walk my everyday walk.
Bottom of the hill, a dog barks, boy yells, “Hey mister.
Hey mister. Hey mister.” We’ve traded names a dozen times.

Then “Hey retard. Retard. Retard.”
Schoolyard to street corner: words
slung by the pocketful.

Crip skin marked,
white skin not.

And then towards the end of the poem:

Crip skin,
white skin:
which stories
do I tell the best,
and which
rarely begin—
turn, flutter,
settle?

Several students read “crip” to mean “Crips and Bloods,” which lead to a branching conversation about multiple meanings, rather than working toward a single “correct” meaning. And someone asked about issues of appropriation, since many of the disabled people using the word crip are white. Are white disabled people misusing or stealing the word from a particular African American context? I left campus that night high on ideas, connections, what it means to listen to readers listening and using my work.

Out of this mix, I wrote the following post to the Queer Poetics class blog:

Notes on the word crip

I left the Queer Poetics class and Mills full of the poetry and politics of crip etymologies, appropriation, and simultaneity. I asked Rebekah [the teacher] if I could write a blog post to both thank all of you for our plentiful conversation and extend it.

I know where crip comes from in disability communities—the long histories of folks who have had cripple used against us. We have taken the word into our own mouths, rolled it around, shortened it, spoken it with fondness, humor, irony, recognition. And yet I can’t remember the first moment I heard the shortened, reclaimed version (nor, for that matter, the longer pain-infused original), when I adopted it as my own, started calling myself a queer crip. What are the specifics to this history and etymology? Who said it first in which spaces; how did it catch on; when was it first written down as a way of inscribing pride and resistance; how did it come to be passed from person to person over the years so that now I find myself thinking, “But didn’t crip just arise organically from disability communities, movements, cultures?” These are the questions to map out personal and communal etymologies that have very little to do with the Oxford English Dictionary, often thought of as the final authority on the history and etymology of English words.

At the same time I know close to nothing about the etymologies of Crips in gang culture and African American communities of Los Angeles. And so I went to Google, which of course can be the beginning of inquiry but rarely the end. I read several historical accounts of the founding and early years of the club, the organization, the social and activist network that became the Crips. There is a good handful of stories about where the name comes from. One story tells that it’s an acronym for “Continuous Revolution in Progress.” Another that it comes from an associative trail of names rich enough for a poem of its own—the Baby Avenues morphing to the Crib Avenues morphing to the Crips. A third that it comes from an old Asian-American woman reporting to the police that she had been mugged by young Black men who were carrying walking sticks and whom she called cripples or, in accented English, maybe crips. And there are additional versions beyond these three. Because I read these stories on the Web rather than learning them in community, I have no idea how each of them may be embedded (or not) in communal and personal etymologies rooted in specific neighborhoods, historical moments, and experiences of racist violence.

But what is clear to me is that both uses of the word crip have long community histories of their own. Neither have been appropriated, borrowed, stolen, misused. Disabled people, particularly white disabled people, who call ourselves crips aren’t twisting an African American history for our gain or pleasure. Black boys and men inside the Crips aren’t referencing a word loaded with ableism. The two uses, histories, and etymologies aren’t akin to white people wearing our hair in dreadlocks; trans people claiming their transness as a disability or birth defect in order to explain and create empathy for their embodiment; or non-Native peoples romanticizing, simplifying, practicing, and assuming ownership of Native spiritual traditions. Instead crip and Crips trace simultaneous etymologies.

What do we learn when we lay them side-by-side? What do they share in common, and where do they diverge? Who has bodily, community, political connections to both traces/words? How does gun violence and injury link the two? And finally inside a poem, what do we as readers and/or writers gain or lose by bringing all the histories and etymologies to bear on a single word or by making choices among them?

Thank you for a plentiful conversation that embraced my poems and spun off from them, leaving me with unanswered questions that demand my writerly attention.

1) I just finished Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, a novel about the German occupation of France during World War II. It’s a powerful story, set against Nemirovsky’s bio. A well-known author and Russian Jew living in France, Nemirovsky was mid-way through writing what she was planning as an epic novel when she was deported to Auschwitz. Her young daughters survived the Holocaust and the war and miraculously ended up with their mother’s partly finished manuscript, which 65 years later they published.

2) I’m halfway through Terry Tempest William’s newest book Finding Beauty in a Broken World, which is about learning to make mosaics, studying endangered prairie dogs, and spending time in Rwanda working with Rwandans to create a mosaic memorial for people who died in the 1994 genocide. I’m stalled a bit; the book’s brilliant, but I’m not ready yet to read about the Rwandan horror.

3) And then I’m listening on tape (well, actually on mp3) to Sherman Alexie read his The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. It’s such the story of poverty, being Native on the reservation, what it means to leave home, and disability (without ever saying the word disability). A few scenes of bullying with the word retard had me squirming with a sense of recognition. So that’s what I’m reading for leisure.

For work I’m in the midst of three books:

4) As research for an essay I’m writing about living in Vermont, I’m reading The Voice of the Dawn: An Autohistory of the Abenaki Nation, learning the details of land theivery, smallpox, and genocide on the piece of earth that white people call Vermont and Abenakis call Wobanakik.

5) In prep for the mini-course on freak show history that I’m teaching at Oberlin in March, I’m reading Sideshow U.S.A. and thinking right now about Batwa man Ota Benga displayed at the Bronx Zoo in 1906 and Yahi man Ishi displayed at the UC Berkeley Museum of Anthropology from 1911 to 1915.

6) And finally I’m reading Lennard Davis on the history of the concept of normal and Chris Bell on white disability studies, both in The Disability Studies Reader.

It feels like a maze of books, rather than a simple stack, because of the connections and shared themes among them, despite their apparent differences. Clearly genocide tracks through most of them, including a connection between the rise of the concept of normal and eugenicists of the late 1800s. Another connective thread is histories of imperialism. I so clearly can visualize the web, the legacy: Ota Benga living in a zoo, Ishi living in a museum, Abenaki people going further underground to escape eugenicists in the 1930s, Nemirovsky dying in Auschwitz, Rwandans dealing with the aftermath of genocide, a Spokane Indian teenager struggling to leave the Res due to poverty and violence. This web is about interlocking histories, none of which are entirely in the past. Throw in the ways “normal” has been used to bolster and justify so much–from gawking at the freak show, zoo, and museum to imperialist invasion–and the ways abuse, neglect, and disregard of the natural world mirror the same in the human world (as if I could separate the two worlds), and I find myself in a dense maze of reading right now.

Of course as mundane as this is, it is also connected to really deep and important issues about impairment, ableism — a word that the software obviously did not know — and disability. One of the sessions that I went to at SDS last summer was about a speech impairment and different modes of technology to either enhance or make possible communication, some of the strategies responding to impairment and others resonding to ableism. The panel of people who spoke included quite a range of different kinds of speech impairments. I ended up feeling very emotional and not very articulate or analytical about what I heard at the time. So many bits and pieces of what some of the panelists talked about struck personal chords, but those chords are very fragmented for me. Mostly now as an adult my speech is understood, or if it isn’t, then the miscomprehension, or the unwillingness to listen to a crip with slurred speech, doesn’t have a big impact on my life. But as a child I struggled with communication a lot, needing translation, facing harassment, and dealing with harmful assumptions all of the time. So listening to the adults on the panel, all of whom were talking about current strategies and the current twine of impairment and ableism in their lives, was really about remembering my past that is loosely connected to my present but not to my actual day-to-day present. Emotional but in ways that I’m still not being able to describe very well.

And this isn’t even beginning to think about the issues of being a writer for whom the act of fingers, or more precisely one finger, on a keyboard is the physical action of writing. If speech recognition works for me this time, how might it change my writing? It’s funny how these questions seem inconsequential because they are about impairment, not about ableism. And yet don’t I know all too well that the sheer physicality of our bodies has to be important too?

One of the points Petra makes, and rightly so, is that I misquote the passage that I’m analyzing. I want to correct that. So here’s the whole passage from Neil (pulled from a longer prose poem called “The Question of Cripple”):

“Neil writes:

when you call us crips
I can’t see or feel your ‘wink’
when you refer to me as a vegetable

or im vegetative
i feel more at ease

is there any humor in crip

maybe wry crips

is our history similarly known to ourselves or the public
as african americans is known

not yet

then why do we borrow a nigger equivalent–is it?–use
of oppressive term for ownership of power

this is my poorly developed opening discussion
even tho im nitwit –not without wit–”

So that’s the whole quote with line breaks. And now I want to go for the nuanced reading. (For a poet, I’m quite a literalist; I miss metaphors and puns and layered nuance all the time. It’s one of my weaknesses as a reader.) I’m struck this time by:

Neil’s playfulness in “wry crips,” which was also the name of a disabled women’s (I think?) theater/storytelling group in the 1980s in the Bay Area, and “nitwit.” This wide ranging exploration of cripple includes this playing with language.

“Our” and “ourselves” can be tricky, elusive words. Who is referred to in the line, “is our history similarly known to ourselves or the public”? I know why I assumed that “our history” means disability history and that disability history is being conceived of as white. My assumptions came partly from the juxtaposition of the very next line, “as afrrican americans is known,” making a simile between “our” history and African-American history. And my assumptions came partly from observing myself and other white activists/cultural workers all too often use “our” to mean white and to make similes with the experiences/histories of people of color. But still in Neil’s line, which singular history is “our history”?

The line “not yet” sits all by itself. Is it meaning to say that “our history” isn’t yet known in the ways African- American history is already known? Clearly that was my earlier reading, and part of my contention was that I don’t believe African-American history is known in such a definitive way. But could “not yet” also be questioning how well both histories are known and undercutting the simile that precedes it? Possibly.

Could I read “not yet” forward, and have it mean that we (who is this we?) haven’t yet borrowed cripple as “a nigger equivalent”? Possibly.

And finally the question, “is it?,” is the most ambiguous two words in a passage characterized by Neil’s spare and dense use of words. I want to explore that question, want to know how different kinds of hate language are connected or not or both. I need the word equivalent to be interrogated. Right here, right now, as a reader, I want/need more from Neil and Petra to entirely trust those two ambiguous words, “is it.” Neil writes in his response to my earlier post, “In the real world sense, would it be too much to suggest that the word “crip” comes from “nigger” a kind of ‘shorthand’ a reference no matter how thoughtless used commonly. Is it thoughtless? or is it a powerful statement? This is what im asking.” If crip does come from nigger, how do I read the word equivalent? How do I tie the very different histories of the two words together? And in this formulation, what happens to people who have been bruised by both words? Inside the book/poem, I have to strain to read/hear all this nuance.

In the end, I am a greedy, literal reader: I know that about myself. I can also be a grateful reader. And I hope my gratitude for Cripple Poetics and for Neil and Petra’s work is also clear and present.

–Crip Chick is so right on about intersectionality, there’s nothing left for me to say.

–What I think about the construction of the phrase “R-word” is completely influenced by Emily Bernard’s incredible essay, “Teaching the N-Word.” I’m wildly ambivalent about the turning of hate language into euphemisms–n-word, b-word, f-word, and now r-word–that somehow are to protect marginalized communities from the pain of hearing those words yet again and privileged peoples from having to repeat the violence. There are two pieces to my ambivalence.

1) The violence has already been done. The damage won’t be rectified by a refusal to say the words. In our activism and analysis around hate language, we need to be vigilant and conscious about triggers and re-creating the power dynamics put in motion by hate language, but I’m not sure that euphemistic substitutions for hate language is a good stand-in for vigilance and consciousness. At the bottom of this part of my ambivalence is a sense that the “r-word” construction is designed largely to protect those of of us who have been battered by the word retard and by the institutional, material, and attitudinal realities that come with it. As one of those people bruised by the dismissiveness, hatred, and physical violence of retard, I don’t need protection; rather I need compassion, rage, allies, and an end to ableism.

2) The “r-word” construction mirrors the “n-word” construction, which precedes it. I don’t know from where the “n-word” construction originates nor what mix of opinions/feelings/thoughts Black people have about it. But whatever the origins, the mirroring of the two constructions communicates that retard and nigger function in the same ways as hate language and carry the same violence and that all the repulsion and outrage white people supposedly feel upon hearing the word nigger should also be felt in the same measure by non-disabled people upon hearing retard. Here again is analogy failing to do the deeper work of intersectionality. Certainly racist hate language and ableist hate language share much in common. (The ways the word monkey has been used against disabled people (both poc and white) and people of color (both disabled and non-disabled) highlight these commonalities.) But there is so much historical and present-day difference between the usage of retard and the usage of nigger and such a lack of real anti-racist work among white disability activists that the analogy reads to me like white people appropriating the political work of Black activists yet again. The analogy sidelines Black disabled people’s experience, and assumes that disabled people are white and Black people are non-disabled. And the question isn’t asked: how does the snarl of hate sound in the lives of disabled people of color?

–Call me a crank but the Special Olympics “Stop the R- Word Campaign” makes me pause. Don’t get me wrong, organizing around retard as hate speech and even protesting Tropic Thunder as a specific cultural example of the use of ableist, as well as racist, hate speech is important work. But since when is the Special Olympics about justice for cognitively disabled people? For many years that organization has been one of the biggest creators of super crip images–that is “heroic” disabled people “inspiring” audiences with their “bravery”–and and have often fanned the flames of pity with its charity-model fundraising. Even the name Special Olympics sets up a charity-model context, rather than a social-justice-model context. I believe that an organization that frames disabled people as inspirational and/or objects of pity is also setting the stage for the unquestioned use of retard. If the Special Olympics is serious about its r-word campaign, it has a lot of internal work to do.

–The image below coupled with text from the Special Olympics website that says, “Historically, we have seen the elimination of other negative stigmatizing words through awareness and education campaigns and societal pressure. We no longer tolerate calling blacks, Jews, Chinese, physically handicapped, homosexuals, or Hispanics by the words nigger, kike, chink, crip, faggot, and spic, respectively,” frankly pisses me off. I want to say, “Oh, really.” What presumption to try to persuade people to take action regarding ableist hate speech by claiming that the the struggle against other kinds of hate speech has already been won. Presumptuous, naive, and privileged, I say. And to suggest that the Black, presumably disabled women in this image don’t hear the word nigger, at least occasionally, while using their images in the struggle against retard is so suspect on so many levels.

Two dark skinned young women stand next to each other dressed in shorts and tank tops with medals hanging around their necks and smiles on their faces. The headline next to them reads, 'R-word is hate speech.' Protest poster found at http://www.selfadvocacy.org/pdf/SpecialOlympics_ProtestSigns2.pdf

At the same time I kept expecting some queerness to appear in the art, the circus, the politics. I mean, it was all so resistant of capitalism, war, consumerism, greed with such an ethic of outlandish/outrageous creativity, all so bent, so queer in the general sense of the word, that I kept being surprised by the lack of specific queerness. I know white Vermont hippie culture, out of which B&P grows, is quite heterosexual; but probably because of my time with the radical faeries, where queerness, drag, outdoor community, and theater merge in a myriad of ways; I really did expect some flavor of queerness to rise to the surface. It didn’t.

On the other hand, I’ve come to practically expect racism and ableism at these kinds of events, and unfortunately my expectations were met in this regard. One of the performers in the circus yesterday was a woman of color and manual wheelchair user. Her roles–passive, limited, using her so clearly as a token woc–had me just shaking my head in disgust. For one, there were no attempts at creating any access in the performing space–a bumpy, slightly soggy pasture–leaving her to wheel over the lumps and softness and perform all at the same time. For two, she was totally not present in the big group song and dance numbers. (Has no one from B&P heard of or seen integrated dance?) For three, in one number she rolled out, followed by a white guy who held a sign saying “Ethiopia” over her head, while other white people in masks performed a dance about how the U.S. gives much more military aid than food aid to Ethiopia, and then at the end when she spoke about this disproportionate aid, the sign holder repeated her, as if the audience might not have understood or heard her. Arg! It was simply a big tangled wad of ableism and racism. And I was dismayed but not surprised.

I’m struck by the contrast between the ways I was surprised by the lack of queerness and the ways I was not surprised by the racism and ableism.